Everything I Know About Love I Learned From Romance Novels (3 page)

As I was writing this book, asking every romance novelist I could think of for her perspective and querying readers for their ideas on how romances have affected them personally, I asked one of my very favorite writers for advice. Loretta Chase has written some of the best romance novels ever in the history of the universe, and I say that without exaggeration or hyperbole. Her books are amazing examples of characterization, with strong women and challenging men, and stories that take place all over the world.

When I asked for her perspective on hero and heroine behavior and on character traits that are required for a romance, her response was so illustrative that I had to include it in its entirety.

Dear Sarah:

When I started thinking about rules, I immediately had an avoidance reaction. I hate the idea of imposing rules on the genre, because someone can come along and break them beautifully. But then I thought about my rules for character traits, and I realized most of my answers were in the movie
The Wizard of Oz.

Interestingly, the hero of the movie is a girl. Everything revolves around Dorothy. Romances are one of the few genres in which the woman really matters. The hero might drive the story, but he’s focused completely on the heroine. Oh, yes, he might have to save the world or build a canal or fight murderous antiquities hunters, but those are little problems to be solved on the way to winning She Who Is the Love of His Life. Forever. And with whom he’ll have the best sex of his life. Ever.

Right there we have our obvious fantasy element. All women know this is not the way it is in real life. Among other things—and I have to leave out politics and the media to keep this at a manageable length—in real life men imagine having sex with other women; the hero of a romance barely even sees other women after he’s met the heroine. In real life, men compartmentalize; in a romance, most of the compartments are filled with Her. In real life, men are easily distracted by, say, golf or a football game, when their women are trying to tell them something; in a romance, the hero is totally distracted by Her.

The Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man are seeking traits that, combined, make my idea of a romance hero—Courage, a Heart, a Brain—and Dorothy, who has all those traits, is a heroine. Equally important, we can relate to all of them at some very basic level.

Seeking to become complete.
All the characters are imperfect, but in the course of their journey, they bring out the best in one another. As a team, they become a sum greater than the parts. In a romance, the hero and heroine bring out the best in each other and again, it’s more than that: these two people could do all right separately, but when they’re together, they create something that transcends who they are as individuals. And I think the great sex we give them—the transcendent sex—is symbolic of that.

Journeying home.
Dorothy is trying to get home, and that is my take on finding the Love of Your Life. When the hero and heroine commit to their relationship, it’s like a homecoming: one finds one’s heart’s home in the loved one.

Individuality.
Like these movie characters, the hero and heroine of a romance novel—or any genre novel—need to be larger than life. Maybe in a romance novel, the couple’s problems don’t amount to a hill of beans, as Rick tells Ilsa in
Casablanca
. Maybe they’re ordinary folks, like the ones who peopled LaVyrle Spencer’s books. But the author makes them big in some way—memorable.

Appeal.
I don’t think there’s a rule that characters need to be beautiful. Most of us have written our
Beauty and the Beast
or
Ugly Duckling
stories. However, I’m shallow, so I make all my heroes tall and hot (at least to the heroine). They don’t need to be, but my feeling is, this is a fantasy and we all know it and so why not make the hero fantastic? The heroine doesn’t have to be attractive—except to him—but we need to understand what draws him to her.

Faithfulness.
Sexual faithfulness isn’t an element of
Wizard
, but its friendship counterpart is there, and I think sexual fidelity is crucial to the idealized friendship of a romance hero and heroine. Once they start down the obstacle-strewn path of the relationship, he needs to be sexually faithful. See above re the woman matters. But faithful applies in other ways: He is or becomes the kind of man a woman can count on. He’ll be there through thick and thin. So will she. Again, real life can be so unstable and people are constantly having the rug pulled out from under them. The romance myth offers the beautiful alternative.

The history books are littered with “Truth Is Stranger than Fiction” stories. Couples overcome religious differences, racial differences, political differences. They find a way to make things work, even when they have mutually exclusive goals. That said, it’s no good putting in historical fact if the readers won’t buy it. The obstacle to be overcome and the way it needs to be overcome must be plausible within the context of the story.

Once the house falls on the witch, we’re ready for the rest of the
Wizard of Oz
extravaganza. We, including children, know it isn’t real. It’s a story! But we know how to suspend disbelief. So we’ll believe, for the time of the romance story, whether the impossible obstacle is physical or psychological. In real life, not all that many people overcome deep stupidity about something or mule-headedness or psychosis or neurosis. But part of the myth belonging to romance is this element of healing, with love being the balm. Again, don’t we wish that could be true in real life?

My sister tells me that
Lord of Scoundrels
was impressive in that way, but you know, I would never recommend shooting a man to help him get his head on straight. But fantasizing about shooting him might help a woman get through a rough day.

There were a lot of books dealing with unhealthy relationships (can you say
Wuthering Heights
?) that left an impression on me as an adolescent, but the great book about two people learning to have a healthy relationship is, I believe,
Pride and Prejudice
. The change happens by degrees, and it takes time, and Elizabeth and Darcy overcome a social difference that, for the time, was a considerable obstacle. It happens in the context of family and friends—the gossip, the backbiting, the changing opinions, the family tensions, the interference, the competitiveness—it’s all there, and it’s so human and so well done that teenagers reading the book today can relate. Elizabeth reading Darcy’s letter, for instance, and the way her view of him begins to change, is I think one of the great examples of character growth.

I know people are going to say that isn’t a romance novel; it’s literature. But it’s both, and don’t we romance authors all wish that might be said of our work some day centuries hence?

Loretta Chase